Chapter 1: What role does takeout play in our emotional well-being?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper Did you have a particularly great day at work or a downright terrible one? In either case, chances are for you, dinner showed up to your place in a takeaway bag.
Takeout seems to have become our universal reward, our comfort, our emotional support meal, a way to treat yourself when things happen at work. I am here with Dr. Susanna Forwood, a psychology professor at Anglia Ruskin University, who has studied just this. Susanna, welcome to the show.
Hi, thank you for inviting me.
When you and your fellow paper authors, professors were sitting around thinking about what to research, did you think, hey, we want to just get some takeaway and have the uni pay for it?
No, so this is nuts as a topic for research.
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Chapter 2: How did Dr. Forwood's research on takeout begin?
So my area is normally like regular food choice. And I was chatting with a colleague who works on deservingness and social justice and the idea that we do things because we feel that we deserve them. And this paper was a mashup of the two. So this is what happens when two academics with non-overlapping topics kind of come up with something in the middle space. It's all about self-gifting.
So what do we allow ourselves to do? Either because we're celebrating a success or because we're consoling ourselves from a bad day. And we were really just interested in exploring the relative likelihoods of different behaviours.
takeaway wins takeaway wins over the other four that we we looked at but what this study really points us to is that this is a huge area actually self-gifting what the the little daily behaviors that we do uh when things are going great or things are going bad there's quite a lot of questions in this space that haven't really been explored fully so i'm not going to be able to answer all your questions but yeah it's a it's an it's an interesting one
Look, here in North America with these fancy apps, you know, these delivery and takeout apps, the orders have gotten so expensive.
Chapter 3: What is self-gifting and how does it relate to food choices?
I do feel like it's like it's a reward when I've had a really rough day or when we're celebrating something like some mini milestone.
It kind of has to be.
Anecdotally, like I completely agree with what you found, but let's talk about how you actually like figure this out. How do you figure out that people are rewarding themselves or treating themselves on a rough day with takeaway?
So what we do here is a little bit of hypothetical. So on this study, we're asking people to imagine a day. And they are actually randomized to different instructions. So some of them are asked to imagine a regular day. Others are asked to imagine a really bad day and we give them a kind of, your meeting went badly, your boss is upset with you.
We kind of give them a bit of an unpacking of what a bad day might be.
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Chapter 4: How do people reward themselves after a good or bad day?
And then the third group were given, you've had a really good day, you nailed that meeting and your boss has taken you on side and given you a little well done and your teammates are really happy with you. And so everyone didn't see the others. They only saw the version that they had. And then what we did was we asked them, OK, imagine you've had that day. What are you likely to do next?
And we actually gave them a kind of a list of options. And the options were to have some alcohol, to eat some chocolate, to get a takeout, to do some kind of an online shopping spree. We didn't say what they might want to buy on that shopping spree, but, you know, like you sit at the computer and have fun. Or, and the fifth option was a bubble bath.
Ooh, bubble bath.
Chapter 5: What behaviors were compared in Dr. Forwood's study?
So again, all those behaviors, we were very aware that not everyone is going to do all of those things. Maybe you don't have a bath. Maybe you're allergic to chocolate. Maybe you just don't drink alcohol. Full stop. So we also separately in the study asked people, would they ever do these behaviors? So the data we actually analyzed filtered out people that just would never do those things.
Got it. So if takeout is not an option for you and all the people like you, that data was excluded from the takeout behavior.
And yet people overwhelmingly, when they felt like they crushed it that day at work or work crushed them, that the takeout was the thing to do?
Kind of, but also remember that the control condition was the average day. And you've made a really good point already, which is takeout's expensive. So actually, did we see them get takeout more on the good and bad days? Or do we see them taking takeout less on an average day? It's kind of hard to know. One is the flip of the other.
But if you think about something like the bubble bath, which is probably free or at least, you know, once you've got a bottle of bubble bath in the house.
I don't know. These bath bombs are expensive, but that's a conversation for someone else.
It's not as expensive as a takeout.
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Chapter 6: How does takeout compare to other self-gifting behaviors?
And similarly, an alcoholic drink or a bar of chocolate, yeah, okay, clearly there's a cost with having that in the house. But if you've got it in the house and you do consume it in your kind of day-to-day routine, we're probably not talking the same amount of cost as a takeout. So those things you might be inclined to do on the average day. Does that make sense? Yeah.
What we found actually was that all of the behaviors, apart from the shopping spree, were more likely on the bad day. But it was only the takeout that was also more likely on the good day. So people, I think, are thinking differently about how they congratulate themselves for good days and how they console themselves for bad days.
Now, I know when I order takeout, it's like a special thing because then I look at my credit card bill. I'm like, why did I spend seven billion dollars on takeout? But whatever. Are people aware of it in the general case? Like, are people conscious that they're treating themselves for either a good day or a bad day?
That's a really good question. Now, because we randomize people, we didn't ask them. We didn't say how much of this is because you had a good day. And the people in all the different conditions were kind of equally likely to be male or of a certain age. So the demographics were kind of balanced across those conditions. So we would have to follow up to find that out.
I suspect people are very aware of this behavior.
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Chapter 7: Are people aware of their emotional eating habits?
I suspect no one is hugely surprised. We would want to do a follow up study that kind of measured behavior in the real in the day. So there's a methodology called ecological momentary analysis where you text people literally in the moment. So like 6 p.m., their phone pings, they get a text. How good was your day? What behavior are you about to do?
So that's a different methodology from what we used. We kind of asked people to imagine. And we might get in that second method, we might get people doing things, not being aware of it in a way that they probably were more aware in our study because we kind of asked them to imagine.
Now, takeaway or delivery, fast food, fried food, it isn't always, but it often can be junky. I mean, good food has butter in it. That's my favorite food group butter. From like a public health perspective, should we be worried about the amount of takeout that people are using for emotional regulation?
Yeah. So this is actually what my interest in the subject was. Because actually, if we can help people who are using takeout for emotional regulation into other behaviors that are equally emotionally consoling or celebratory, but maybe without the pounds, that That would be a win. But we can't really do that unless we know what those behaviors are.
And if we don't know whether or not they do give the same emotional consolation value. So there's a bit of research there, but that's really where my interest lies.
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Chapter 8: What healthier alternatives to takeout can people consider?
I'm very much trying to help people make healthier food choices.
So for someone listening and thinking, and this includes me, oh, this is definitely me. I'm the person who comes home after a rough day or a good day and splurges for takeout. Is there a better, healthier way to self-gift without taking out the fun and joy of it?
I mean, I would...
make your own experiments I literally like you can you can google how to have a nice evening you're gonna have your own likes and dislikes and I I wouldn't want to guess what they are but there's not going to be a lot of surprises here so I don't know invite a friend over to play a game or to get online and and play a game online or watch a film or is there some kind of music that you're like I really want to sit down close the doors get everyone out the room and just immerse myself in a really good jazz LP or what
You know, it depends what your vibe is. What is your stuff? What is your thing? My advice would be anything that's kind of sensorily immersive, anything that makes you, that kind of takes over all your senses and makes you feel a bit different is likely to be effective. So takeaway kind of does that. It takes us to a place which isn't the everyday. It's not stuff we cook ourselves.
And that's really where the value lies.
Do you think rough work culture, like stress, long hours, burnout, feeds into why food has become such a comfort, such an emotional reward?
I don't know. I suspect there's a commercial edge to this. People are making money out of this. And it's a very effective money-making strategy, telling you that eating indulgent food will make you feel better. Sells, sells stuff.
I hope an advertiser for an unhealthy food company isn't listening, because this could help them plan an ad campaign. Had a rough day? Order this fast food.
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